According to the accepted narrative of the Western mainstream media, the crisis begun when the so-called fresh-faced young pro-democracy activists overturned what they believed was a brutal Russian-backed dictatorship which stood in Ukraine’s way, keeping it from joining the European family of nations and sharing in its prosperity. This led to the claimed “Russia’s incursion into Ukraine” and what they called “its annexation of Crimea.“

However, 22 analysts with impeccable credentials were able to review the events that led up to the current crisis in Ukraine, and an entirely different story emerges.

The authors reveal the true aims of the backers of the military conflict and what they were willing to do in order to achieve their goals.

‘Finance in Today’s World Has Become War by Non-Military Means’

In his chapter “The new Cold War’s Ukraine Gambit”, Michael Hudson, a world-famous research professor of economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City explains what the conflict is actually all about.

“The object is the same as that of military conquest: appropriation of land and basic infrastructure, and the rents that can be extracted as tribute,” he writes. “In today’s world this is taken mainly in the form of debt service and privatization. That is how neoliberalism works, subduing economies by indebting their governments and using unpayably high debts as a lever to pry away the public domain at distress prices.”

“It is what today’s New Cold War is all about. Backed by the IMF and European Central Bank (ECB) as knee-breakers in what has become in effect a financial extension of NATO, the aim is for US and allied investors to appropriate the plums that kleptocrats have taken from the public domain of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet economies in these countries, as well as whatever assets remain.”

“The Western leaders have left Ukraine looking like a Northern Hemisphere Nigeria. Real wages plunged by more than 75 percent from their 1991 level wages already by 1998 and have stagnated ever since. This ‘cheap labor’ makes Ukraine appealing to European investors, who now are making their own move to obtain what Ukraine’s oligarchs have grabitized,” the professor writes. “The West has made it clear that it will help these individuals convert their takings into cash and move it safely into Western banks, luxury properties and other nouveau riches assets.”

“From a military vantage point, the New Cold War aims to prevent revenue from these privatized assets from being used to rebuild, re-industrialize, and hence potentially to re-militarize the Russian and Near Abroad economies. This is why US strategists have moved to pry Ukraine out of the Russian orbit. The dream is to achieve the Cold War’s coup de grace along the lines outlined by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 Grand Chessboard: ‘Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. The aim is to break as much of Ukraine as possible out of the Russian orbit and to draw it into the West, and into NATO itself.'”

The writers elaborate on how the US manages to achieve this.

‘Reverse Blame is Always the US Geostrategic Game.’

“It is true that Ukraine—the biggest country and bread basket of Europe-has now been pried wide open for transnational Western banks, agribusiness, Big Oil and NATO to feed on. And it is true that all talk of ‘land grab’ has been projected onto Russia even as US Greystone and Blackwater mercenaries — now called ‘Academi’ in the Big Lie lexicon—move on the ground in Ukraine as the US and NATO propagate ever more threats of force and embargo against ‘Russia’s aggression,'” John McMurtry, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Guelph, Canada, writes in his chapter “The Ukraine crisis: decoding its deep structural meaning.”

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“Russia’s ‘designs to take the whole of Ukraine’ is again a US projection of its own objective, as in the old days when a ‘world rule plot’ was attributed to the former USSR,” McMurtry writes.

“Financial contracts and assets are violated by one side alone. Hate campaigns without evidence go one way. Uprisings have been mass murderous from the US-coup side and long without harm from the resisting side. Russia is behind its own borders, and the US deploys threats, covert operations and mercenaries from thousands of miles away,” the author writes.

He also notes that the reversal of blame is always the US method of pretext and justification. This is why Russia is pervasively vilified in the mass media, and Canada’s big-oil regime chimes in along with the UK. As always, denunciation rules without reasoned understanding. As always, the US-led financial and military forces of private money-power expansion move behind the abomination of designated enemies.

Any nation or leader that doesn’t comply with the transnational corporate control of resources and markets across borders is considered a villain.

With Russia firmly defending its ground, the writers hope that this time US/NATO-led corporate globalization cannot destroy nations at will. Sometimes history happens as it should.